


We'll Wait for our Miracle

by j_marquis



Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, Kingdom Hearts
Genre: M/M, Slow Burn, other characters will be added as they come up, the old shinra mansion stands outside of radiant garden
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-20
Updated: 2018-06-25
Packaged: 2019-05-09 06:29:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,310
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14710865
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/j_marquis/pseuds/j_marquis
Summary: There's a house, out in the wastelands past the Radiant Garden. A house nothing dares to live.





	1. Chapter 1

The first flight over the lands outside of Radiant Garden left them with little hope as to survivors of the destroyed world. Some houses, scattered Heartless, the forests beginning to overtake houses and villages.

Only one house still standing.

The second flight took note of where the Heartless favored, where the settlements had been, and, again, of the one house still standing. An old thing, two stories, wide and old and overgrown with weeds and vines. But the Heartless didn't go anywhere near it. A wide circle formed around their hunting patterns, nothing would go near the old house. Not even a bird flew overhead.

So on the third flight Cid landed the Tiny Bronco, spells stored in his lance and potions in his pouch. He didn't want to know what was in this place, what even the Heartless would avoid. It was silent, oppressive, his boots in the overwrought weeds seemed like bombs landing in a place nothing lived. Even the weeds were dried out and browned and crunching under his boots, breaking against the tip of his spear.

The door was all but rotted off its hinges, and Cid nudged the thing with the blunt end of his spear, pushing it open into a lavish entryway faded and beaten down with age. Cobwebs dangled from a chandelier, a potted flower was wilted and brown and dry, smelled of something cloyingly sweet and utterly foul. Beads of dust floated through the sunlight in broken windows, but the spiders were dead in piles on the floor, uneaten by other carrion beasts.

Nothing could live here.

Cid kicked dead leaves aside, searched empty rooms full of rotting furniture and dust, faded papers well past being legible until the silence was deafening, and he muttered to himself just to keep sane. Doors were falling off rusted hinges, clothes molding away in long gone signs of life. People had lived here. It was all but certain people had died here. Cid grumbled a few choice curses about the house's mother, and jumped over the stairs, coming to a quick conclusion that he didn't want to chance walking up them, the way the wood rotted through. But the second floor landing held up alright, and the rooms were much the same.

Until Cid reached a turret, the door that should have been secret, the way it was melded with the wall, standing wide open, rusted metal stairs spiraling down. He hadn't seen anything else that might be making the house so utterly lifeless, it must be down in that tower.

However far down it went.

And it went damned far down, into the earth, cold rock as dull and dark and quiet as the rest of the house had been. Like the earth itself was closing in around him. It was caved in, a little ways up ahead, but there was a wooden door, rotted and hanging wide open into a room of coffins. Cid found new ways to curse the world itself, this house, and all their mothers and ancestors and their pets and genitals. A room full of coffins.

Thankfully, most of them were empty.

But not all of them.

Skeletons, in a couple, long gone and rotted to tatters, the bones broken, entirely gone in some places, their lifeless, toothy grins mocking him for coming to this place at all. He mocked them right back, put the butt of a cigarette between one's teeth, tipped another's head clean off.

One of the coffins had a body still in it. Fresh, from the looks of it, almost lifelike. Could have been breathing, the way the red shawl wrapped around it shifted, settled. Pale skin, wild, long dark hair, a gnarled, messy metal claw replaced his left hand and the black clothing that covered almost all of his skin made him look more like one of the Heartless than a man.

His eyes opened.


	2. Chapter 2

Cid made an outright embarrassing noise, a yelp of shock and surprise, tumbling back, spear raised at the ready. One thing alive in this forsaken place and it, he, perhaps, was sitting up slowly, dark hair washing in waves over his shoulders, his red eyes glowed in the dim light, narrowed on Cid.

"Are you human?"

That wasn't the question Cid had expected to be asked. He leveled the spear towards the man, watching him emerge from the coffin. It was inelegant, his legs trembled, he stumbled, blinking rapidly. Cid could see the signs of strain on his skinny body.

How long had it been since he had last emerged from that coffin?

"I-I'm human." Cid stammered. He didn't know how to answer him, how to take this man who had only moments ago seemed so inhuman, now struggling to stand on legs unused to movement. Cid's first instinct was to dart forward, to put his hands to the man's shoulders and help stabilize him. But he wasn't even entirely sure what he was looking at.

"How long has it been?" The man asked, behind the wilds of black hair that spilled into his eyes, streaking his pale face with shadows.

"Since what?" Cid narrowed his eyes, tightened his grip.

"Since the Darkness they found in the mountains."

Cid shook his head, dumbly. He knew the darkness had begun in the mountains, he knew that was what brought Xehanort, the nobodies, the destruction of what had been his home. But he didn't know how long it had been there. How long nothing had been able to live in this place. He didn't know how long this man had been in this basement, locked inside with aching silence.

This time, he did move forward. He put his hands on the man's shoulders, brushed his hair aside, looked into his red eyes, they glowed, but they didn't waver from Cid's.

"Let's get you out of here." Cid's voice dropped, he was quiet, like this man he had found in the basement of the house where nothing lived was nothing more than a skittish kitten who needed nothing more than a calm voice and a gentle touch to soothe him. He stumbled back, and there was a gun, a flash of magic, fire spewing through the room.

Cid jumped into it, rolled, the burn lashed against the back of his jacket but he swung his polearm forward, tripping the strange thing from the basement. He wasn't ready, trying to defend himself, he was scared and he was uncertain and he went down. A sleep spell put him down, and Cid got up to leave, watching the embers fade from the fire.

He couldn't leave there what he had found.

Nothing living could stay in the mansion.

He swung the man over his shoulder, winced at the extra weight. Cid was strong, but he was not the man he had been, the man who had saved who he could when the Darkness ate his world. The weight of just one extra life held him down, slowed him up the old metal stairs, Cid could feel the shifts of his breathing as he tried to get out of the house, just get out of the house. Nothing could live here. The Darkness called to him, sang out to him, how easy it would be if he just let go, if he dropped the man they had decided to keep, if he gave up. If he just stayed here, the Darkness was so sweet, it lulled his eyes heavy, his limbs sluggish, it called for him by name. It reminded him of the people who had fallen to it, sang to him the silly lullabies Shera used to sing when she wanted him to come to bed.

_Take a break,_ it sang, _Take a break._

Cid cursed the memories that sang with her voice and hiked the man up on his shoulder, dropped down to the main floor.

_There's a lake I know._

"Fuck you. Shera couldn't sing." Cid grumbled. He had no time for the Darkness, no matter how cloyingly sweet it could sound.

He shoved his unconscious companion _captive?_ into his plane, made sure he was buckled in. The man had gone hard under the sleep spell, seemed no amount of jostling could wake him. Probably better, at the moment, though getting him to wake was going to be an issue, and that fire spell had been strong. Cid wasn't sure he wanted to stick around to see how he reacted to waking in the sterile observation room Leon was sure to shove him in when Cid came back. It wasn't like he had expected to find anything still living when he asked Cid to survey the wastelands of what had once been a thriving world. Especially not anything living.

And the Darkness in that house. Something unreal. The Darkness usually took form, came at them in waves of monsters. It didn't call out, didn't beg for them. Didn't care who it took as long as it took something, each human Heart another meal to an uncaring force of nature. This wasn't the Darkness they understood. He didn't know how to fight it. Burdened by the sleeping man in the cockpit beside him, Cid had only been able to run away. He didn't know what was still lurking in their world. Something that knew him better than he knew himself.

Shera _could_ sing, years and years before the Darkness came.

When she had been alive.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> aftepes.tumblr.com


	3. Chapter 3

They held the thing he found in a cell in the castle at Radiant Garden, they didn't understand him. He had attacked. He could be dangerous. The inky darkness that had followed them, that laced like scar tissue over the man's chest. They kept him in a sleep spell, it bubbled around his skinny form in a golden crystal, maintained by the castle itself. Leon had removed a gold claw only to find out that it replaced the man's left arm, darkness had eaten away at the flesh until nothing remained, it ended in the black of nothingness just below his elbow. They'd given him the dignity of leaving his pants, but he'd been stripped of his red cloak, his heavily buckled shirt, his boots. Long black hair floated like it was underwater in the spell.

Cid checked on him daily.

He didn't know why, but every day, after he was done with repairs, checking the computers and the defense system, he would go down to the cell, the sleep crystal, and watch the man for long moments. The hollow where his heart should be, now a dim glow of something long broken. No one in what was left of Radiant Garden, not the survivors, the recovered Nobodies, no one living, knew who he was. No one knew if he had a heart at all. No one wanted to touch the thick, oily darkness long enough to check.

Cid didn't fear the darkness.

He started slow, touched the sleep bubble first, then his arm, where the darkness had taken away so much of him. The inky black hair, flowing around him in spidering, silken strands, ran through Cid's fingers. The scars that traced towards his chest.

And then Cid felt his heart.

It was weak, fluttering, the beat was there but it was faint. Cid let the darkness curl up his arm so he could reach, looking for what remained of his heart, that weak baby bird he could cup in his hand. He could feel it's warmth against uncertain fingers, Cid didn't understand the heart, but he knew this one was still there. Maybe it was broken, maybe parts of it were missing, but it was there. Cid felt it.

And so when he checked on him, he checked on his heart. Touched it, for brief seconds, even though it meant touching the darkness, he touched his heart. Maybe he let the darkness get too close, but he touched it, like he was checking if he was breathing, seeing if he was alive. If his heart was still holding on.

That was when the dreams started. Dreams of a boy, running around the Radiant Garden, wild with the eagerness of youth, running full speed to his father's lab, hoping this time he would be allowed, the boy would get to watch his father, who was so often here, instead of at home. Dreams of the boy growing up, the top of his class, he lost that wildness to steady, hard work, always hoping this was the time he would be noticed, this was the time it would mean something. This time, _he_ would mean something. The close fit of the guard's uniform, the way his body always felt too small for the finery, the smile of a girl as she ducked into his father's lab, with a small wave of her fingers. She saw him. Finally, someone did.

Cid dreamed of the lives of the heart he had held.

It felt wrong. Intrusive. Like reading someone's diary, reading their mind. He dreamed he _was_ that man he had found in the basement, and sometimes when he woke his body felt all wrong, too short and too tall and too skinny and too wide like he was and wasn't himself. But he needed to know what happened. How he ended up in that house on the other side of the mountains, how his heart came to be so weak. How the darkness came so close to him without taking him away entirely.

"We need to wake him up." Cid told Leon, grumbling around a cigarette as they watched the security droids run their rounds.

"We _need_ to keep it contained."

"Him." Cid spat. "Ain't some monster. Just a person got too close to the darkness."

"We don't know that."

"Fine. I'll finangle up a holding cell. Then we wake him. Find out who he is. What he knows."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> aftepes.tumblr.com


End file.
